The Fischer Tropsch Synthesis On Supported Iron And Cobalt Catalysts

Since the turn of the last century when the field of catalysis was born, iron and cobalt have been key players in numerous catalysis processes. These metals, due to their ability to activate CO and CH, haev a major economic impact worldwide. Several industrial processes and synthetic routes use these metals: biomass-to-liquids (BTL), coal-to-liquids (CTL), natural gas-to-liquids (GTL), water-gas-shift, alcohol synthesis, alcohol steam reforming, polymerization processes, cross-coupling reactions, and photocatalyst activated reactions. A vast number of materials are produced from these processes, including oil, lubricants, waxes, diesel and jet fuels, hydrogen (e.g., fuel cell applications), gasoline, rubbers, plastics, alcohols, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, feed-stock chemicals, and other alternative materials. However, given the true complexities of the variables involved in these processes, many key mechanistic issues are still not fully defined or understood. This Special Issue of Catalysis will be a collaborative effort to combine current catalysis research on these metals from experimental and theoretical perspectives on both heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysts. We welcome contributions from the catalysis community on catalyst characterization, kinetics, reaction mechanism, reactor development, theoretical modeling, and surface science.

Rising oil costs have stimulated significant interest in the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) as a method for producing a synthetic petroleum substitute. Drawn from the proceedings at a symposium held during the 236th meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia in August 2008, Advances in Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis, Catalysts, and Cataly

This book is based on a symposium held during the 248th American Chemical Society meeting that focused on use of the Fischer-Tropsch process in producing synthetic fuels. Its contents reflect the four dominant subjects of the meeting: catalyst preparation and activation, catalyst activity and reaction mechanisms, catalyst characterization and related reactions, and topics concerning commercializing the Fischer-Tropsch process. It covers recent developments related to renewable resources and green energy and provides a glimpse of the commercial potential of the Fischer-Tropsch process in synthetic fuel production.

The second half of this dissertation investigates the effects of operating conditions including the partial pressures of CO and H2 and temperature on the deactivation by carbon of 25 wt% Co/ 0.25 wt% Pt/Al2O3 catalyst. It also reports the kinetics of the main FT reaction on this catalyst. As temperature increases, the H2 and CO orders for the main reaction (in the absence of deactivation) become more positive and more negative, respectively. A new mechanism was proposed to account for the inhibition effect of CO at high reaction temperatures, which includes H-assisted dissociation of CO to C* and OH*. Further, twelve samples of the CoPt/Al2O3 catalyst were tested over a period of 800 hours and XCO